Measuring temporal compensation effect in speech perception

The perceptual compensation effect between neighboring speech segments is measured in various word contexts to explore the following two problems: (1) whether temporal modifications of multiple segments perceptually affect each other, and (2) which aspect of the stimulus correlates with the perceptually salient temporal markers. Experiment 1 utilizes an acceptability rating of temporal unnaturalness for words with temporal modifications. It shows that a vowel (V) duration and its adjacent consonant (C) duration can perceptually compensate each other. This finding demonstrates the presence of a time perception range wider than a single segment (V or C). The results of the first experiment also show that rating scores for compensatory modification between C and V do not depend on the temporal order of modified pairs (C-to-V or V-to-C) but rather on the loudness difference between V and C; acceptability decreases when the loudness difference between V and C becomes high. This suggests that perceptually salient markers locate around major loudness jumps. Experiment 2 further investigates the influence of the temporal order of V and C by utilizing a detection task instead of the acceptability rating.

[1]  H. Fujisaki,et al.  Auditory Perception of Duration of Speech and Non-Speech Stimuli , 1975 .

[2]  Joseph L. Zinnes,et al.  Theory and Methods of Scaling. , 1958 .

[3]  Rolf Carlson,et al.  Perception of Segmental Duration , 1975 .

[4]  G. Fant,et al.  Auditory analysis and perception of speech , 1975 .

[5]  A. Huggins,et al.  On the perception of temporal phenomena in speech. , 1972, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[6]  Yoshinori Sagisaka,et al.  On sentence-level factors governing segmental duration in Japanese , 1989 .

[7]  S. Imai.  Speech analysis synthesis system using the log magnitude approximation filter , 1978 .

[8]  A. Huggins,et al.  Just noticeable differences for segment duration in natural speech. , 1969, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[9]  D. Klatt.  Linguistic uses of segmental duration in English: acoustic and perceptual evidence. , 1976, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[10]  Minoru Tsuzaki,et al.  Intensity effect on discrimination of auditory duration flanked by preceding and succeedine tones , 1994 .

[11]  H H Schulze,et al.  The detectability of local and global displacements in regular rhythmic patterns , 1978, Psychological research.

[12]  D. M. Green,et al.  Signal detection theory and psychophysics , 1966 .

[13]  Shigeru Katagiri,et al.  A large-scale Japanese speech database , 1990, ICSLP.

[14]  Gérard Bailly,et al.  Talking Machines: Theories, Models, and Designs , 1992 .

[15]  A. Cohen,et al.  Structure and Process in Speech Perception , 1975 .

[16]  N. Campbell.  Moraic and syllable-level effects on speech timing , 1991 .

[17]  Seiichiro Namba,et al.  Program for calculating loudness according to DIN 45631 (ISO 532B). , 1991 .

[18]  Y. Tohkura,et al.  Speech, Perception, Production and Linguistic Structure , 1992 .

[19]  Jan P. H. van Santen,et al.  Contextual effects on vowel duration , 1992, Speech Commun..